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I too remember the wall-to-wall promotion that was given this book, in the 1967-68 time period. Not only was it in the display window of the local bookstore, but big posters were displayed in the window too. It was all the buzz among the chattering class at that time, on TV, in Newsweek and Time (I think each of those very influential magazines gave it cover-story treatment).

The book gave a great accelerative kick to the birth control and ZPG movements, which were already well underway and funded by many governments, including ours.

Western countries took these policy suggestions to heart, with family sizes falling to close to or below the replacement rate. Of course, the third-world countries paid no attention.

Then, the switcheroo. When the first-world countries realized that their populations weren't growing fast enough to sustain the debt load that were the result of their deficit spending policies, their governments started saying "we've got to import more workers to replace the ones that we've lost!"

Guess where they started getting the replacement workers from?

Younger people today stressing about silly things like global warming should know that these doom and gloom grifters have been around for over a half century. Below is another book from that era that my mother had a copy of. I was 13 in 1975 and yet here I am. I guess I'm a survivor. I even survived my mother's baloney and cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread. Of which there was always plenty.

I found the opening paragraph to "Population Bomb", for everybody's entertainment...this was written in 1968. If I wrote something so ridiculously wrong like that, I would be embarrassed to go outside in public.

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to "stretch" the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs not just of individual families, but of society as a whole...